Secondary Source 1: MacEachern, A Theory, in Practice: Back to the Bering Land Bridge

You have likely seen the video from Canada Day of a Mi’kmaw ceremony in Halifax disrupted by what appears to be a curling foursome and spare. At one point, one of the young white men (the skip?) asks a young, apparently Indigenous woman, what is clearly a leading question: “Has this always been Mi’kmaw land?” She replies, “Yes, it was. It has always been unceded Mi’kmaw territory.” Like a cheetah, he pounces: “What about the land bridge? Was that after the land bridge?” “The land bridge has been disproven,” she replies calmly. He’s got nothing; the conversation moves on.

I squirmed when watching that part of the video, because the Passive Aggressive Boys could easily have been students in my Canadian history survey class, where I teach about the Bering land bridge, the route by which humans are believed to have first peopled the Americas during the last ice age. Or maybe they read an Active History post I wrote last year defending the continued relevance of the bridge theory. Or maybe they’ve read the latest edition of the Canadian history textbook Origins, in which I again give the theory credence. (Who am I kidding: nobody reads the textbook.)

The trouble is that while the Bering land bridge theory remains by far the most widely-accepted theory among archaeologists and paleogeneticists of when and how Indigenous people first came to the Americas, the suggestion that the migration occurred “only” 14,500 or so years ago has been taken as evidence by the alt-right, the alt-lite, and lots of ordinary folk that Indigenous peoples have no special claim to the hemisphere. As Globe and Mail columnist Tabatha Southey memorably puts it, “To those educated primarily by the Department of Comment Thread at Dubious Site U, the mention of a land bridge is assumed to be geographic-Kryptonite to Indigenous people. One just has to say ‘land bridge’ a few times, and all land claims magically vanish like tears in rain, the theory goes. Because “LOL, everyone moved here, you see.’”

I squirmed, then, because that Proud Boy in Halifax was perverting something I teach.

But I also squirmed because the young woman got it wrong, too: the Bering land bridge theory has not been disproven.

I wrote last year’s Active History post hoping to provoke interest and discussion about how historians talk about early Canada.[1] My focus was on how we use, misuse, and selectively apply and ignore scientific findings in trying to comprehend and teach that time. I had hoped that the footnote showing the wide range of Canadian history textbooks dating first occupation in the Americas from anywhere between 10,000 to 100,000 years would help bear this out. (I should say explicitly: Nothing in that post or this one precludes or downplays the importance of including – even centring – Indigenous knowledge when teaching Canadian history. Even while teaching science’s best current understanding of the distant past, we also need to ensure that students learn the importance of Indigenous understandings of Creation for connecting the land to the people and fostering Indigenous perspectives and knowledge.)

But the post died, no discussion ensued. The closest thing to an impact it had was last month, when it was cited in a Vice article about Governor General David Johnston’s controversial reference to First Nations as immigrants. Notably, the author then misleadingly tweeted his own article’s conclusions as “Do you remember the thing about the Bering Strait land bridge we learned in school? Yeah, turns out it’s bunk.”

The only substantive response I ever received to my post was a tweet saying, “Pretty sure V Deloria (“Low Bridge, Everybody Cross!”) + Indig languages & oral histories debunked this ages ago!” While I don’t pretend that a single tweet can fully represent an entire side of this debate, this one is, I believe, sufficiently representative that it deserves parsing.[2] With respect to Indigenous languages, if there is prominent linguistic evidence preempting or disproving Indigenous arrival in the Americas during the last ice age, I’m not aware of it.[3] With respect to oral histories, while there are instances of Western science and traditional Indigenous knowledge corroborating one another,[4] they are such different ways of understanding the world that I don’t see how one can be said to debunk the other.

With respect to Vine Deloria, Jr., the “Low Bridge, Everybody Cross!” chapter from his 1995 Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact is indeed widely touted as debunking the Bering land bridge theory. Deloria was an important scholar who made a substantial impact on how we think about North American history. But this late-career book makes countless claims that don’t hold up to scrutiny. It contends, for example, that mastodons still lived in the US when the Pilgrims arrived, dinosaurs lived contemporaneously with humans, and the Old Testament supports Indigenous stories of a great deluge.[5] This is a book which argues that now-extinct megafauna were mega because of elevated carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and that that correlation is visible during our own era of high CO2 levels in the increased size of high school athletes.[6] Don’t believe me; go have a look.

Deloria’s chapter on the Bering land bridge is much the same. By times, he plays the scientific authority. “We do not know the cause of the ice ages,” he tells us. “They can range from the sudden cooling of the sun, a shift in the poles, the solar system suddenly traveling through an area of intense cold in space, or even a cometary dump of water.”[7] He is largely wrong in the first sentence, weirdly wrong all over the second sentence – and the second sentence negates the first. By times, he suggests that a fringe scientific authority has been overlooked or suppressed. In supporting one theory (which only the footnote informs us is from 1940), he says on one page that the scientist “was about as close to a living deity in evolutionary biology as Mother Nature herself,” and on the next page that the scientist’s findings were nevertheless “unread or unheeded by several decades of scientific writers.”[8] Throughout, Deloria’s tone is dismissive. “No one seems to have a good explanation why or how the weather warms,” he writes; he decries “popular apologists for orthodox science” and “’scientific’ explanations.”[9] Readers in this era of alternative facts and fake news might take pause about a book whose subtitle speaks of the Myth of Scientific Fact.

In any case, regardless of how well the Bering land bridge theory aligns with the archaeological and genetic record, and regardless of how broadly it is accepted within the scientific community, it has become something of an embarrassment, both because some non-Indigenous people have warped its meaning and because many other people have questioned not just the validity but also the motivations underlying it – and these reactions are related, of course.

In the middle of the David Johnston affair, I heard rumblings on Twitter from a few Canadian historians that perhaps we should drop the bridge theory altogether. We could begin our histories when the Indigenous presence throughout the continent is undisputed – maybe 10,000 years ago, or just after the last ice has melted – so as to sidestep the whole thorny issue of Indigenous arrival.

I can’t imagine such a thing. Canadian history begins with First Nations, and I don’t see how we show more respect for their story by telling less of it. Instead, I think we need to learn more about the land bridge theory – and the citations in the 2016 Nature article that improved the theory are a good place to start. We need to learn more generally about the archaeology and paleogenetics on which we rely to understand Canada’s earliest histories. We need to recognize that not every archaeological find suggesting an earlier date of human arrival on the continent necessarily upends what has been a very robust theory.

But above all, in teaching the Bering land bridge theory we need to crush the idea that Indigenous arrival hundreds of generations ago bears some sort of equivalency with immigration of the last few hundred years. In his book, Deloria recalls meeting a woman who told him, “Well, dearie, we are all immigrants from somewhere.” He regrets not replying, “Yes, indeed, but it makes one helluva difference whether we came 100,000 years ago or just out of boat steerage a generation back.”[10] Agreed: it absolutely does. That is the argument to make. But that argument is fundamentally the same whether Indigenous people arrived 100,000 years ago or 14,500. Except that the evidence is much, much stronger that they arrived closer to 14,500. In which case arguing for 100,000, and arguing against 14,500 on weak evidence, is not just wrong, it’s self-defeating.

Following the Governor General’s comment that First Nations were the first immigrants, Indigenous broadcaster Jesse Wente tweeted “We. Have. Been. Here. Forever.” and then two days later reformulated this as “effectively forever, especially in comparison to the state of Canada.” This was not a concession, it was an enhancement. As trenchant as his original formulation was, the latter one is far superior not only in that it is true, but in that pretty much everyone in Canada already agrees that it is true.[11]

[1] Seriously, how many other articles about the Bering land bridge do you know that legitimately bring up Silvio from The Sopranos?

[2] I did ask the author to discuss her position further on Active History, but without response.

[3] It has to be noted that it’s unclear what “debunked” – like “disproven,” spoken by the woman in Halifax – even means, or whether it always means the same thing, in reference to the bridge theory. Is the argument that the bridge did not exist, that people did not cross it, or that they were not the first to reach the Americas?

[4] Knowledge of the 1700 earthquake in the Northwest, pieced together using both seismology and Huu-ay-aht oral accounts, would seem a great example. See Ann Finkbeiner, “The Great Quake and the Great Drowning,” Hakai Magazine.

[6] Deloria, 176. The elevated carbon dioxide level of the past had fallen, by the way, because “a comet or meteor composed almost wholly of ice and water … passed close enough to the Earth to disintegrate, dumping ice in massive amounts on the magnetic poles.” (172)

[9] Deloria, 94, 101, 105. Deloria revels in the contrarian pose. He writes of having originally been impressed by Werner Muller’s work, “but decided to check it out with anthropologists at the Smithsonian.” His next sentence mentions, but does not explain, their negative assessment of it. His next sentence reads, “Since in matters that deal with anthropology …the Smithsonian is more often wrong than Immanuel Kant was punctual, I take this description as a firm endorsement that Muller is right in most of his arguments.” (77)